


What Heals Me

by hellkitty



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: M/M, PWP, Shibari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 23:14:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12119346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: So, yeah, I'm doing an ambulance overnight and get jerked out of a kind hawt dream to go scrape some drunk jerk old enough to have kids in college off the sidewalk because he picked a fight with five younger guys and, well, lost.By 'kind of hawt' I should mean, "I have a really fucked up subconscious okok".Here's a reeeeeeasonable approximation of said dream, pretty much what it says on the labels.  No one said my dreams were deep, y'all.





	What Heals Me

 

It mattered who did it, as much as how it was done.  And Frank had fought the rising need, seething under his skin, for as long as he could, waiting until it felt like it would burn through his skin entirely, before he forced himself to ask the only person he could trust with this.

It wasn’t the same as trusting him. Frank had learned to parcel himself off, never letting anyone know too much about him. Not Karen. Not Micro. Not Red.  He could trust no one--not even himself--with everything anymore. But he could trust a few, with a little.

Red didn’t trust him, either.  But that mistrust/distrust spun into a sort of stability, a temporary balance where Frank could, at least, get this.

He circled the empty room, the seething making him restless. Even so, his footfalls were soft, the side-of-foot heel-toe glide of a special operator. Or a predator.  

He was both.

“Let me know if I hurt you,” Matt said, sliding one of the lengths of rope through his gloved hands, uneasily. He could feel the connection, some wiry sacred burden between them, something heavy, yet fragile.

Frank gave that laugh of his, the one that was part snort, bitterblack sound. “Not gonna happen, Red.”  

Matt fought down the urge to argue, because a lawyer would argue. Because a coward would delay. And he didn’t want to admit that he was scared--less at what he might do than that he might enjoy it.

“Yeah. Okay.” No more stalling. No more stretching the moment out in front of them.  “Good place to start?” His admission that he’d never done this before.  

“Wrists,” Frank said, flatly, mouth twitching down.

Matt nodded, knowing Frank could see him, knowing Frank was watching him with that feral wariness, as he stepped into the circle from the sole ceiling light, hands finding the center of one of the pieces of rope.  

Frank didn’t offer, didn’t hold his hands out. He stood, stilling himself with effort, hands at his sides, as Matt circled him, the light sliding over Matt’s red leathers.  Frank might trust him with this, but Matt wasn’t quite ready to trust him with who he was, under the suit.  

Matt circled him again, slowly, considering, before darting in, the rope darting out like a snake’s tongue, catching Frank’s wrists, yanking them behind the back.  Matt could hear the rope bite into bare skin, could hear the sharp intake of breath, the way Frank’s body went rigid, then relaxed, like a force of will, a self-taming.  Which set something alight in Matt’s own body, something that roared aggressive at the other’s passivity, and he pulled the rope tighter, weaving it quickly around the arms again and again, latticing up the arms, winching the forearms back.

Frank hissed, his tendons in his shoulders giving sharp snaps as his shoulders were pulled back, muscles bulging against the faded black of the tee shirt he wore. He whipped his head to one side, half his mouth twitching in a half snarl.  

A snarl that Matt could feel, and it made that aggressive thing in him stir further awake. “Knees,” he said, hearing his own voice come out like a croak.  

The snarling mouth sank to a growl, guttural and thick with need, Frank’s hands twisting and balling into fists, testing the limits of the binding.  

“Knees,” Matt said, louder, clearer, following the command with a quick strike, buckling the other man’s knees.  

Frank dropped, heavily, without his hands to balance him, landing hard on the concrete floor with his knees, struggling upwards even as Matt took the height advantage to loop the rope over the other’s broad shoulders, pinning the arms more closely to his sides.  

Matt half-hitched a net down the side of Frank’s leg, the rope rough against the coarse denim, binding the knee bent, immobile. He could feel the muscles strain under the rope, fighting the restriction, he could hear Frank’s breath quicken, his heartbeat stronger, louder, more insistent.  He bound the other leg the same way, pausing to run his hands up the central cables of the netting when he was done, adjusting the symmetry, feeling the contrast between the tight rope and the taut muscle beneath, feeling his own pulse tick up.  

Frank felt his muscles jump, twitching, almost involuntarily, felt the hard bite of the rope down his forearms, his wrist pulses throbbing against the smooth, harsh nylon. Like SERE training, when they’d finally captured him, last of his unit. A band of rope dug into his upper thighs, stirring to mind an old memory, when he’d broken his femur on a bad jump, and the medic had traction-splinted him--the agony and its sudden relief as he’d ratcheted the tension, pulling the bones straight.  

There was no relief here, not yet, and too many fucking memories.  He groaned, wanting more, needing more, something to pull him deeper down, to a place where he couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, where everything disappeared, where he disappeared.  

Maybe then, the hurting would stop, too.  

He wouldn’t ask for more. He wouldn’t beg. He’d trust that Red knew, could figure it out, that silent understanding men could share.  

Matt circled him again, feeling Frank’s eyes following him--sometimes. Sometimes, for a few seconds, Frank would seem to fade, to sink into some other place, his pulse starting to slow, as if soothed, before stuttering up again.  Matt knew what part of it could feel like--that slow rising pain of the body, when a position is held too long, when the muscles burn through their energy.  First, tightness, then trembling, a tight, stretching pain, begging for movement, for release.  He felt Frank’s chest muscles twitch, just that way, as he pondered what to do next. Bend him forward, over his knees?

Too much like submission, too much like surrender, and while part of him was tempted--darkly thrilled--at the prospect of breaking the hard defiance he could feel in Frank, it wasn’t, somehow, right. It didn’t feel right, and he couldn’t quite figure out why.  It wasn’t what he needed, what he could feel Frank needed.

Backwards, then.  

It was a tearing kind of cry--not the hard, solid grunt of when Nesbitt had had Frank, beaten him. This was the sound of something ripping free, as he pushed back on Frank’s shoulders, forcing them to the ground. Frank’s back arched, trying to lift off his bound arms underneath him, his knees levering off the ground until Matt stepped on them, booted feet forcing the bound legs back down so there was a long, arching line from his knees through his spine.  Frank’s neck took some of the strain, the weight of part of his body as he fought to lift his ribcage off his arms, his shoulders screaming fire. His thighs became long lines of red pain, pulsing at his hips and his arched spine felt like something pried open, a grey fog that felt like panic and death swirling up it.  He forced his breath into it, deeper in his belly, letting it come, letting the red and grey crash over him, letting his body reach its limits of endurance, and fade beyond them.  The past disappeared.The future winked out.  There was only a hypervivid present, physical pain obliterating everything but now, now, now, insistent and throbbing and alive.  He became a tiny dot, an infinitesimal awareness crashing against everything he did not want to face, crashing through it. Pain was the language he spoke, and it spoke back to him, through him, wrapping him up tighter than the ropes that bound him.

And, eventually, it set him free, transcendent. Matt heard the moment, when Frank’s breath went from hoarse pants to sudden, slow, surrender, when he sank back, neck releasing, onto the floor, onto his bound arms, as though they didn’t exist, as though he couldn’t feel them.  He could feel the way the tension wrung itself out of the body, off his face, the way the eyes lidded slowly, almost languorously.

Frank hadn’t told him how it would end, what to do, but Matt didn’t make it without planning ahead, so he’d stowed a pair of Claire’s old trauma shears in the bag he’d brought with him, with all the rope.  Knives, he knew, only cut rope that fast in the movies. Even so, it took him a few tries to get the shears to bite through all the strands. He stripped off his gloves, to better feel the line of rope and fabric, rope and sweat-damp skin, the way the ribs rose and sank back, creaking the cords bound over them.  Wherever Frank was, it wasn’t here, and Matt could do anything he wanted with him right now. And there was a hot whisper of temptation, that shook his hand as it held the trauma shears, as his hand ran up one thigh, finding the fold at the pelvis, the firm muscle and hard bone, still quivering, gently, subsiding, under his hand. He could do anything he wanted, anything: Frank was helpless, vulnerable, and…

...he couldn’t do it. Matt pulled himself back from the edge of it, the half formed scraps of what he could do forced out like withered leaves.  He wasn’t that. Of all he’d done, good or bad, he wasn’t one who took advantage of weakness, of trust.  He’d hurt enough people around him, unwilling. He wouldn’t do it willingly.  

So he forced himself at his work, carefully, gently cutting the binding ropes away, wondering as he did when the last time was that anyone had touched Frank gently.Too long, he thought, long enough that Frank had long ago forgotten that way, as if it was a language he no longer spoke.  

This was, and this was gentleness and release to him, this was release, and trust, and intimacy. An intimacy he only trusted Matt with, which made it almost sacred, no matter how dark.   

He left the ropes in place, just cut, loosened, enough that blood could flow.  He could see bruising along Frank's arms, small abrasions over his shoulders, where the rope had scraped as he'd struggled--small reminders, marks on his body.  

Matt looked around, but the room was empty--typical Frank Castle. Not even a bed, or a chair. As if any sort of comfort was too much, more than he deserved.  So Matt settled for wadding up the duffle bag to slide under Frank's head, just enough to lift it off the cold, brutal concrete.  

And then he left, finding the old round light switch and cutting the lights with the sharp click, leaving Frank alone in darkness, in a tangle of rope, in whatever peace he had found.  

  


**Author's Note:**

> The pose Frank's in at the end is something my yoga teacher calls "Vishnu's Couch". I wanted to append a picture of it, but apparently Vishnu's Couch, in official yoga terms, is quite different than the one we do in class. Which does, in fact, really freakin' hurt, and does stretch the vagus nerve which causes a vasovagal reaction in yoga newbies (why most yoga newbies really hate Camel Pose, for example). But yeah, it IS physically possible--in the names of 'the dumb shit I do for fic research' I got into it myself this morning. You're...welcome and I'm apparently a masochist?
> 
> Also, yes, I know Frank's allegedly a Marine and SERE is an Army thing, but if you're going to milwank PWP, you need to rethink your priorities.


End file.
